Fear Of Sales, A Hard Habit To Break

I’ve been writing my Blogs all about fictitious financial advisors during the month of February and today’s Blog is in keeping with this theme.

On a personal note …

Our February E-Newsletter was published yesterday and you can receive your copy by clicking; February E-Newsletter

February has been very busy working with clients and managing the business and I am enjoying being off the road from speaking.

The speaking starts soon enough with six Financial Advisor Public Speaking Dates in March.

Fear Of Sales, A Hard Habit To Break

– photo courtesy of; http://www.kidsfirstmedia.com/detail/205310.html

Many advisors were brought up through the ranks starting their career with an agency that provided them with a sales manger and back office support, so that all they were required to do was invest their time in product knowledge and sales.

For years, the advisor met with the sales manager on a regular basis and the sales manager helped him in many ways which included breaking through his fear of sales.

The advisor’s fear of sales was likely never healed and the advisor coped with his fear of sales through forming a habit of constant and consistent activity. The sales manager did everything in their power to make sure that the advisor kept the sales activity up. In essence, the activity became a coping mechanism that medicated their fear of sales because once they got busy, he forgot about his fear of sales and the compounded sales results also helped to ward off his fear.

I say the fear of sales, or a fear of lack of sales, was never healed and my evidence is the advisor used a massive amount of energy to push himself to create the sales and to cope with the fear. While he often came close to and even broke his sales goal, he was left unfulfilled by the sales goal often experiencing an energy crash or melt down because the sales push and the coping was all consuming. This left him with little energy for anything else leaving him with an unbalanced business and personal life. This was a contributing factor to health and relationship issues.

The lack of fulfillment after all of his energy was invested in coping and creating the sales left the advisor with the question of, “is this all there is?”. This left the advisor with a dangerous thought of, “there must be something wrong with me”, because of not feeling fulfilled after all of the energy went out to create the sales.

What to do?

Create more sales because this is a safe haven? Go through the same cycle again investing a huge amount of energy to breakthrough the fear and be left with feeling unfulfilled and ride this roller coaster time and time again?

This habit becomes detrimental to those advisors that go on to creating their own business. While they have the sales, it makes it difficult for them to stop and provide the leadership that their business requires because, what would that feel like if the sales stopped?

This is about stop “doing” sales, and start “being” a leader.